What a week for Michigan State University.
By the time Tom Izzo’s latest all-everything point guard Jeremy Fears Jr. announced he was foregoing the NBA draft and returning to lead the Spartans next season, the university was searching for its next president.
President Kevin Guskiewicz, who had been conspicuously quiet since a late night May 17 meeting in which trustees essentially doubled his salary and unveiled controversial new board rules aimed at quelling public dissent, was, on Wednesday, named the next president of Clemson University. If you can’t recall how many people have led the university in the eight years since longtime former President Lou Anna K. Simon resigned in 2018, that’s OK. I had to look it up too.
Guskiewicz took an $800,000 pay cut to get the Clemson job. As I spoke to readers and others throughout the week, that seemed to be the biggest shock to the decision that leaves MSU looking for a new leader. It was maybe the strongest message yet that the issues with the eight-member board are worse than many believed.
The search for the next president should be an interesting undertaking given that former MSU President Samuel Stanley Jr. also blasted the board after a short tenure in East Lansing.
Regardless, it’s a major setback for MSU, which seemed to finally be gaining some momentum after years of struggles after the Larry Nassar scandal. Columnist Graham Couch put that into perspective in a column.
There’s a growing movement in political circles to do away with statewide elections for Michigan’s Big 3 universities and have the governor appoint board members at Wayne State, the University of Michigan and MSU, which is the case already for the state’s other public universities. I’m not yet convinced that will solve MSU’s issues. It’s worth noting that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had a chance to remove two of the trustees who have been accused of causing friction on the board when an investigation found they committed misconduct in office. She didn’t. And several of the appointees on the board that has split into two factions that can’t, or won’t, play well together were put on the board by Whitmer.
There are lots of questions about MSU right now. Will Athletic Director J Batt, who was recruited by Guskiewicz, stay? Will the new board rules, which seem dubious, withstand legal challenges? Two trustees who have refused to sign them, Detroit Democrat Rema Vassar and Plymouth Republican Mike Balow, have raised questions about whether the rules are unconstitutional, given that trustees are statewide elected officials. And The Detroit News reported Friday night that the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression believes that to be the case as well.
Reporter Karly Graham spent most of her week reporting all the developments, and she and Graham and others will be busy in coming weeks as we chronicle the university’s efforts to move forward.
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This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: MSU dominates the news cycle again
Reporting by Al Wilson, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
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